“but vive la specialisation! Go to, let us centrifugate." Such was the sarcasm in 1882 of John Franklin Jameson, an instructor in history at the newly founded Johns Hopkins, when faced with the increasing compartmentalization of learning at the modern university.Following the German example, Anglo-American universities had begun reconceptualizing the nature of scholarship by putting greater emphasis on "science for its own sake," which led to PhD programs, sharper disciplinary boundaries, and clearer distinctions between professional academics and dilettantes.2